Quote:
Originally Posted by dk0
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What gets me is that pull-to-entrance was the most accessible ToV has ever been. For all kinds of guilds and players. There's a serious misconception that you need a zerg or had to be crazy hardcore to compete, but that was absolutely not true.
Small guilds like Rustle & Core were very successful. Towards the end, AG started to drop the "casual" image and showed up to compete with some great success. I am absolutely confident any "casual" guild could have put in less effort in ToV than they did on targets like VS, fear golems, etc. and walk away with kills.
Spawn windows were tight in these days. This made raiding very manageable for people with lives outside of EQ. Also because of this, just by showing up for a few hours each cycle, there was a solid chance you could bag a dragon just because other guilds would be locked in to another target, since many windows would overlap.
Hardcore players got to be hardcore. Spend time on the line, coth mages, whatever role--there was plenty to do for these players. But also casual players got to be casual. Logging in for 10 minutes to stab a dragon is laughed at a lot, but warmbody auto-attackers make raiding incredibly accessible to casual players who can't commit to multiple-hour clears.
It was literally a win/win for everybody. I know petitions got intense and too frequent, but has it gotten any better?
Nowadays it's a numbers game. You will always have a single dominant guild rather than real competition because it's about getting sheer numbers. Success yields growth, and so it takes a long time to curb the momentum of a successful guild.
I haven't played in a while but apparently there are bag limits and/or rotations on the server now. In the time it takes to kill a single charity dragon, any guild could have had put a system in place (placed coth mages, setup a test server, practiced pulls, etc.) to compete every week and result in way more pixels. Oh well, I do genuinely hope people are having fun.
Since I assume we're never going back to rooted dragons, my opinion is that the server needs a brand new ruleset that's designed for the current meta rather than rehashed rules that were created for a completely different era. But that's another discussion.
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Unrooted dragons were fun for the pull team, but that amounted to a small fraction of each raid force. The zone and the rest of its spawns were out of sight, out of mind for the majority who may as well have been warm bodies for how much they contributed. Few commands needed to be followed and not much attention had to be paid.
With push interrupts, very little differentiated one dragon from another. Right and left cubby were the new lairs for a lot of the dragons, each one isolated from any of the hazards and mishaps that came with crawling through the zone. Vyemm's knockback was inconsequential there, a slight rollercoaster thrill for DPS and nothing more.
EQ was mostly a PVE game. While that translated into Players Versus Non-Player Characters, the environment was still supposed to be half of the battle. Certain spells have zone restrictions, most notably levitate in Plane of Sky. But the NPCs and their corners of the zones were created with each other in mind. Eejag can't be pulled out of the lava to the Nektulos or Najena zoneline. Brother Jentry is tethered to Sir Lucan. Icy terrors have a knockback to toss players into bear pits. The list goes on.
If people aren't going to roleplay, if only a fraction of them are going to be put to use, and if there is no zone layout to traverse other than the designated kill spots, the letters in MMORPG don't represent much of anything.